Misquoting Jesus: Does Bart Ehrman Prove the New Testament is
Corrupt?by Daniel McCarthy

Introduction

Was Jesus Misquoted?

According to Bart Ehrman, not only was Jesus misquoted, but we have no
real way of knowing anything He said, since the apostles and scribes
basically wrote whatever they wanted. Accordingly, these people, and later
Christian leaders, chose from among a plethora of writings to "create"
Christianity. Does the evidence show that this is how Christianity
originated or is Ehrman just reflecting his own personal biases?

Rich Deem, editor

In his best selling book, Misquoting Jesus, Dr. Bart
Ehrman, a well known New Testament scholar and critic, seeks to show that the
New Testament is a corrupt document changed through the evolutionary process of
scribal alteration, early Christian theological apologetics, and poor
scholarship. Since he contends that if God had set out to write a book, he would
have preserved an uncorrupted and inerrant work, Dr. Ehrman seeks to show that
the New Testament is riddled with errors. By showing it is riddled with errors,
Ehrman seeks to prove that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God, but
strictly a human book reflecting human hopes, dreams and aspirations. This paper
reviews his arguments and rebuts several of his claims.

Ehrman's conversion

At the beginning of Misquoting Jesus, Dr. Ehrman
outlines his conversion from a believer in orthodox Christianity to agnosticism.
He goes on to set the stage that he grew up in a “conservative place and time”1
with very conservative, somewhat naive friends. While a sophomore in high
school, he believes he had a genuine “born-again” experience. He claims this
experience led him to become so passionate about the Bible that he chose to
attend Moody Bible Institute.

Errors in the Bible?

It is at this point in the book Dr. Ehrman introduces the
central theme of his book to the reader: the Bible is error-ridden. Therefore;
one cannot know what the Bible actually means. The beginning of this revelation
came to him in one of the first classes at Moody. He learned that, “None of the
copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently
and/or intentionally changed them in place. So, rather than actually having the
inspired words of the autographs of the Bible, what we have are the error-ridden
copies of the autographs.”2
Becoming defensive, Ehrman decided to study even harder so he could become a New
Testament scholar to help recover God’s words. Once he had recovered these
words, he could “become an evangelical ‘voice’ in secular circles.”3

After graduating from Moody Bible Institute, Dr. Ehrman
enrolled at Wheaton College. To pursue his goal of finding the true words of the
Bible, he delved deeply into Greek and the original biblical languages. He
states, “The full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament
could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language.”4
Therefore, by pursuing the languages, he could recover the original meaning and
text.

His study of the original languages helped him research the
developmental history of the manuscripts of the New Testament documents. Through
this study, he learned that, “We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast
majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from
them, evidently in thousands of ways.”5
At this point, Dr. Ehrman began having serious doubts about the inspiration of
the New Testament and whether he could recover the original words. These doubts
drove Ehrman to dig deeper and deeper into the history and text of the New
Testament ultimately leading him to go to Princeton Seminary to study with the
world’s leading expert in the field of New Testament, Dr. Bruce Metzger.

At Princeton Seminary, he recounts one of the first
experiences he had with a conservative professor Dr. Cullen Story. Dr. Ehrman
had been given the task to discover a solution to the textual variant in Mark 2.
Jesus cites the Old Testament to show the Pharisees that the “Sabbath was made
for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.”6
David had gone into the temple when Abiathar was high priest, seemingly in
violation of the Sabbath according to the Pharisees. The problem seems to be
that Abiathar was not the high priest, but rather, his father, Ahimelch.
Ehrman recounts how he arduously labored over a “long and complicated”7
and ultimately “convoluted”8
story to show that this was, in fact, not a mistake. Shockingly, Professor Story
wrote back, “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”9
At this point, Dr. Ehrman says he could not accept the Bible as the Word of God
and rejected Christianity.

Ehrman's error

Dr. Craig Evans cites Ehrman’s quote in
Fabricating Jesus. He states that Ehrman’s line of reasoning is “so typical of brittle
fundamentalism.”10
He continues by stating “rigid ideas about the verbal inspiration and inerrancy
of Scripture underlie Ehrman’s problem.”11
Evans summarizes that “the truth of the Christian message hinges not on the
inerrancy of Scripture…but on the resurrection of Jesus.”12
Throughout
Fabricating Jesus, Evans points out that many people, like
Ehrman, have lost their faith because they have an inflexible understanding of
what inerrancy and verbal inspiration mean.

Evolution of the Bible?

Dr. Ehrman goes on to tie Christianity to Judaism as a
religion that relied on letters and books. And as such, Early Christian books
were purported to have been written by a small group of religious elites who
used them to control uneducated people. He claims “Christians, like most other
people throughout the empire (including Jews!), were illiterate.”13
Due to widespread illiteracy, the common people had to rely upon well-educated
people like Paul and the scribes to tell them what was true. These evangelists
“unified the faith and the practices of the Christians; they indicated what the
Christians were supposed to believe and how they were supposed to behave.”14

Dr. Ehrman goes into depth to show that people like Paul
and the scribes defined what became known as “orthodox” and “heresy”. Ehrman
suggests that the fight over orthodoxy is a fight over books which were
presented to illiterate and superstitious people. Like an archetype of himself,
Ehrman shows that better educated Greeks like Celsus, “the learned critic,”15
pointed out that the earliest Christians were poor and uneducated. Orthodoxy
eventually won out because theologically motivated apologists like Origen
defeated those who “chose the wrong way to understand their faith”16
and labeled them as heretics.

Throughout Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman builds his case
to try to prove that the process of developing the New Testament was fatally
flawed. He portrays the compilation of the New Testament documents like a two to
three hundred year game of telephone tag among illiterate people. Before Jerome
and the advent of professional scribes, the manuscripts of the New Testament
were copied when one of their members could, “cobble together enough free time
to make a copy of a text.”17
Therefore, the New Testament Documents were developed in a completely
untrustworthy manner.

Textual critics

Dr. Ehrman’s bleak outlook of the text is not shared by the
majority of textual critics. Daniel Wallace PhD, a fellow textual critic, is
quick to point out, that, “Here (chapter 2) Ehrman mixes standard text-critical
information with his own interpretation, an interpretation that is by no means
shared by all textual critics, nor even most of them.”18
In Misquoting Jesus and on primetime television, Dr. Ehrman deceptively
leads the audience to believe his questionable interpretation is how all or the
great majority textual critics view the scribal process. In
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Dr. Blomberg counters that, “one of
the better kept secrets”19
is “how reliable the New Testament documents are.”20
In Misquoting Jesus, Dr. Ehrman never references conservative
counterpoints, like Drs. Wallace or Blomberg, to his assertions, though he does
consistently bring up more liberal counterpoints to make himself look more
moderate.

NT variants

Dr. Ehrman attempts to demonstrate dramatic flaws in modern
versions of the Bible. He accuses Erasmus, whose work heavily influenced modern
versions of the Bible like the King James Version, as being a sloppy scholar who
was under competitive pressure to complete the work and, “rushed out rather than
edited”21
his final manuscript. He sums up by saying that Erasmus’ interpretation of the
texts, “entered into the English stream of consciousness merely by a chance of
history, based upon manuscripts that Erasmus just happened to have handy to him
and one that was manufactured for his benefit.”22

Due to all of these various changes to the text, Ehrman
claims that there are more variants in the New Testament text than there are
words in the text. Ehrman has loudly proclaimed in several appearances on the
television show Primetime that since there are an enormous amount of variants in
the New Testament, we cannot know what the original authors meant. Daniel
Wallace agrees with Ehrman that there are about 400,000 variants; he goes on to
say “but by itself is misleading. Anyone who teaches NT textual criticism knows
that this fact is only part of the picture and that, if left dangling in front
of the reader without explanation is a distorted view. Once it is revealed that
the great majority of these variants are inconsequential—involving spelling
differences that cannot even be translated, articles with proper nouns, word
order changes, and the like—and that only a very small minority of the variants
alter the meaning of the text, the whole picture begins to come into focus.
Indeed, only about 1% of the textual variants are both meaningful and viable.”23

Attempting to demonstrate that textual critics face an
insurmountable hurdle when attempting to reconstruct the original text, Ehrman
cites Celsus again who, “argued that Christians changed the text at will, as if
drunk from a drinking bout.”24
He also points out that discrepancies in the Bible were acknowledged in the
early Church. “Pope Damascus was so concerned about varieties of Latin
manuscripts that he commissioned Jerome to produce a standardized translation.”25

What seems to evade Ehrman is that there appears to have
been a standard against which to compare these variants. Otherwise, how could
one know that there were variants or the text was changed? Ehrman dubiously
cites a chief critic of Christianity as if what Celsus says is uncritically
true. Ehrman criticizes the manuscripts that were available to Jerome as,
“manuscripts that cannot be trusted.”26

While criticizing the process of transmission, Ehrman
ignores the massive variety of New Testament manuscripts and commentaries on the
New Testament available to textual critics. Craig Blomberg points out there are
more than 5000 manuscripts available in Greek to help identify textual variants
and move close to the original text. Unlike Ehrman who give the impression that
all textual scholars seem to think that the original text is unrecoverable due
to the questionable transmission process, “Scholars of almost every theological
stripe attest to the profound care with which the NT books were copied in the
Greek language, and later transmitted and preserved in Syriac, Coptic, Latin and
a variety of other ancient European and Middle Eastern languages.”27

Moreover, critics have other sources of ancient information
to reconstruct much of what is contained in the New Testament. As Professor
Kenneth Samples points out, “Even without these thousands of manuscripts,
virtually the entire New Testament text could be reproduced from specific
scriptural citations within written (and preserved) sermons, commentaries, and
various other works of the early church fathers.”28
Ehrman’s apologetic intentions become clear as he seeks to mislead the reader
into believing that the New Testament was compiled by a group of illiterate,
lazy scribes who cannot be trusted.

Marginalizing textual critics

After reviewing the problems of recovering the text
in the early church, Ehrman considers how 18th century textual
critics including Johann Bengel and Johann Wettstein approached the text.
Ehrman views Bengel as, “a classically trained, extremely careful interpreter of
the biblical text.”29
Not only is he perhaps the best known biblical commentator, but “he wrote
extensive notes on every book of the New Testament.”30
Though Bengel was meticulous and intellectually accomplished, Ehrman points out
that, his, “religious commitments permeated his life and thought.”31
Vital to Ehrman’s apologetic, he amazingly links Bengel to Hal Lindsey and Tim
Lahaye because Bengel believed that the Olivet Discourse may be used in
predicting end time events. The goal of Ehrman is to discredit Bengel by showing
that the only way he could believe the Bible was the inspired word of God was
due to his wacky religious presuppositions.

In contrast to Bengel, Ehrman picks what he most likely
sees as a person who parallels his life, Johann Wettstein. He is described by
Ehrman as starting out in University as a devoted evangelical who saw that God
had, “bestowed this book (Bible) once and for all on the world as an instrument
for perfection of human character.”32
Wettstein’s goal was to become expert on the Bible and further its cause for
mankind. On a trip to England where was he was given full access to the Codex
Alexandrinus, he had his faith shaken. While studying the text, he found that
many of the references to Jesus’ divinity involved textual variants. Similar to
Ehrman’s loss of faith due to his loss of trust in the inerrancy of the
Bible, Wettstein lost his faith because of the problems he saw the text
posed in verses like 1 John 5:7-8, the Johannine Comma.

Dr. Ehrman turns next to modern textual critic’s use of
internal evidence to evaluate the manuscripts. Internal evidence is the
evaluation and study of the authors writing style, use of vocabulary and the
theology perspective. Ehrman holds much in common with scholars like Rudolph
Bultmann believing “the writers were more concerned about faith and the
application of the Christian message to daily concerns than about the actual
events in the life of Jesus.”33
Ehrman’s post-modern worldview is relevant in his analysis because he views the
documents as more reflective of the interpretive community developing the
manuscripts rather than being committed to what the original authors had to say.

Ehrman's worldview

As Professor Samples points out, the foundation of a post
modern worldview is based upon, “the individual’s perceptions, opinions,
experiences, inclinations and desires.”34
This is further corroborated by Wallace who points out, “It’s almost as
if external evidence is a nonstarter for Ehrman.”35
There is “internal evidence” for Ehrman’s worldview in chapter 5 because Ehrman
immediately attempts to show that three different authors within the New
Testament seem to have three completely different pictures of Jesus. He believes
the words they penned to make sense of the world were purely subjective because
they seemed to have conflicting viewpoints of Jesus.

Ehrman supports this thesis through the lens of Mark 1:41.
He compares the seemingly angry Jesus in Mark 1:41 to a parallel passage which
portrays an imperturbable Jesus in Luke 22:39-46. Then he compares both passages
to another parallel in Hebrews 2:8-9 where Jesus seems forsaken by God, not
angry or imperturbable. Ehrman uses this comparison to attempt to prove that
these interpretive communities highlight a subjective and disjointed picture of
the Jesus. Ehrman sums up, “Luke’s portrayal of Jesus stands in contrast not
only to that of Mark, but also to that of other New Testament authors, including
the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.”36

According to Ehrman, this discontinuity raises a powerful
challenge to those who see the Bible as not only inerrant, but inspired by God.
In his book Inerrancy, Gordon Lewis briefly attempts to address this
question by discussing how the human authors may have interfaced with divine
inspiration. Lewis acknowledges this objection cited by Dr. Ehrman. “Because of
the complexity of the subject, this chapter must be considered merely a
preliminary draft of a major book or books needed on this issue, with all of its
ramifications.”37
Lewis continues on to quote B.B. Warfield who provides an excellent illustration
of why each of these authors described Jesus differently by comparing each of
the authors to colors, “What if the colors of the stained glass window have been
designed by the architect for the express purpose of giving to the light that
floods the cathedral precisely by the tone and quality it receives from them.”38
In other words, each author of scripture is able to illuminate the audience to
another facet of the divine picture of God.

NT canon

Ehrman then returns to the early church period where he
suggests that the Bible we have today is the result of a theological battle
between diverse groups of people. Just Ehrman believes that the New Testament
writers seem to have a diverse set of beliefs, outside groups of people, with
different backgrounds and ideologies, saw him even more differently. According
to Ehrman, naturally they had, “lots of other gospels, acts, epistles and
apocalypses having very different perspectives from those found in the books
that eventually came to be called the New Testament.”39
Ehrman states, “All these groups claimed to be Christian, insisting that their
views were true and had been taught by Jesus and his followers.”40

All of these groups that claimed to be Christians warred
until Constantine ratified what became known as orthodoxy. “The group that
established itself as ‘orthodox’ (as always in quotation marks) then determined
what future Christian generations would believe and read as scripture.”41
He states, “Only one group eventually ‘won out’ in these debates. It was this
group that decided what the Christian creeds would be…this was the group that
decided which books would be included in the canon of scripture.”42

Dr. Ehrman is unbalanced in his presentation and never
discusses challenges to his hypothesis. For instance, Richard Bauckham has
strongly argued that the Gospels were based on eyewitness testimony.
Bauckham argues the Gospels identify eyewitnesses to the “whole
ministry of Jesus, from its beginning.”43
Gary Habermas states that even most critical scholars believe 1 Corinthians 15
was written within 5 years of Jesus’ death. Dr. Craig Blomberg states Paul
believed and confirmed the content or kerugma of 1 Corinthians 15 and “that he
was telling the truth.”44

Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace sum it up
well when they state that Bart Ehrman confuses “second and third century gospel
and gospel-like texts as giving us an equally relevant picture of this early
period”45
with the New Testaments with “roots in the earliest era of belief in Jesus.”46
They further point out extensive scholarly work devoted to why certain
books were included and why different books were excluded. They conclude that
Ehrman misleads his readers because he ignores the massive body of scholarly
material contradicting his thesis in Misquoting Jesus.

Scribal input?

Dr. Ehrman finishes Misquoting Jesus by attempting to show
that the text of the New Testament is heavily influenced by the apologetic
interpretations of the scribes. He portrays the New Testament writers as
anti-women and anti-pagan. Most flamboyantly, Ehrman attempts to show that the
early Christians were anti-Jewish. Ehrman first states that Jesus had no
intention of starting a new religion, but as his followers were increasingly
excluded from the Temple, they became anti-Jewish. “Within just a few decades of
his death, Jesus’ followers had formed a religion that stood over-against
Judaism.”47

Ehrman then turns his guns at the apostles and tries to
show that there was conflict within their ranks over whether to be pro Jewish or
anti-Jewish. Here we see a bizarre conspiracy theory floated by Ehrman grounded
in his post modern worldview. “Early Christians, of course, had other
opinions-as they did on nearly every issue of the day!”48
Dr. Ehrman contrasts Matthew’s position in which Jesus’, “followers naturally
kept the Law, just as Jesus did himself”49
with Paul’s position that “keeping the Law had no role in salvation.”50
What Ehrman conveniently leaves out is that Matthew does not imply that you had
to keep the Law to attain salvation. Darrell Bock agrees and states that in Acts
we see this tension between different practices within the earliest Christian
movement, “But Paul, Peter, and James did share the same faith,
as Paul himself notes in Galatians.”51

Perhaps the most offensive (my wife is a Messianic Jew) and
ignorant assertion made by Dr. Ehrman is when he asks the question, “Why would
Jesus pray for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully
rejected God himself?”52
Clearly, Dr. Ehrman does not understand the character of God himself. For
throughout the Old Testament, the Jews continually rejected God, yet they were
in fact forgiven. Jesus himself stated that he wept over Jerusalem rejecting him
as Messiah. Even Paul stated in Romans that He is a Jew first and there would be
a future time when the Jews would turn back to their Messiah.

Dr. Ehrman concludes his book in the vein of a post-modern
manifesto. He declares that scribes had changed the texts of the New Testament
both to suit their theological and social circumstances, as well as due to their
ineptitude. Furthermore, Dr. Ehrman states that the scribes were constrained by
subjective and normal human tendencies by stating, “What they were doing with
the text was not all that different from what each of us does every time we read
a text.”53
Ehrman asserts that there is no absolute truth to be found. His position is well
stated in his conclusion. “I began to see that since each of these authors is
different, it was not appropriate to think that anyone of them meant the same
thing as some other author meant.”54
In other words, the work of the New Testament is not the work of God and man in
inerrant harmony, but the work of the New Testament is simply the work of human
hands. Moreover, the reason the New Testament was written was not to reveal the
God of the Bible in the person of Jesus, but so that the writers, “texts might
have significance for them, and how they might help them make sense of their own
situation and their own lives.”55

Conclusion

Dr. Bart Ehrman claims that the New Testament has been altered by scribes and
religious leaders to reflect their own brand of religious belief. However, a
critique of Dr. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, shows that hegrossly exaggerates New Testament textual differences and fails to cite
textual critics who disagree with his undocumented claims about possible changes. Contrary to Dr. Ehrman's assertions, it is clear that the
New Testament canon was already accepted by the Church by the early second
century, and textual comparison shows that no major doctrinal statements were
changed or added after that time.